Pasting \Windows\Fonts from some other drive to the C: drive.... note the scroll-bar positions and sizes - the diagonal line goes all the way man, all the way.

LOL!

There was me thinking that Explorer in 2000 pasting icons off the bottom of the screen somewhere was bad enough. I don't just mean where the final icons go off-screen (it's done that too) but where I right-clicked on a clear area of the desktop, Paste, and the icons ended up somewhere else. No idea where, but they weren't visible. I manually arrange mine and unlike other GUIs, there's no Clean Up option that only resolves problems like this.

By the way, does XP still have that bug where D:\WINNT\Fonts in Explorer shows the contents of C:\WINNT\Fonts?

By the way, does XP still have that bug where D:\WINNT\Fonts in Explorer shows the contents of C:\WINNT\Fonts?

Daniel Beardsmore:

By the way, does XP still have that bug where D:\WINNT\Fonts in Explorer shows the contents of C:\WINNT\Fonts?

  That's not a bug, it's a feature; fonts is a magic folder with a (hidden+system attributes) desktop.ini in it that makes a combined shell view.  Like the way that if you go to any drive letter and try and explore the \Recycler folder, you'll still get your one and only Recycle bin; or the way all the subfolders in your temporary internet files give you the internet cache view, and various other examples I can't bring to mind right now.

DaveK:

That's not a bug, it's a feature; fonts is a magic folder with a (hidden+system attributes) desktop.ini in it that makes a combined shell view.  Like the way that if you go to any drive letter and try and explore the \Recycler folder, you'll still get your one and only Recycle bin; or the way all the subfolders in your temporary internet files give you the internet cache view, and various other examples I can't bring to mind right now.

A fonts view should pull the fonts info from the applicable folder. A desktop.ini in D:\WINNT\Fonts that says "I am a fonts folder" should display the contents of that folder as a fonts folder, not some other folder. Sadly, I think the fonts system of Windows is far too overcomplicated -- I would imagine the data comes not from the folder itself, but from the Registry. In which case, using a fake view of C:\WINNT\Fonts as a way to manage fonts is rather bizarre. Apple didn't use fake folder views, but even Mac OS copied parts of each font into the kernel suitcase. Personally I am wholly against having the disc browser outright lie and trip you up: if you need to manage fonts, make a font manager. (I also dislike cmd auto-completing desktop.ini but copy then lying that it does not exist and refusing to copy it until I use attrib to -s -h it.)

The Recycler system is even more nuts. I have a back-up of my 486's hard drive at C:\From Seagate. I used to run IT Utilities which gave me a trash can in Windows 3.11. If I browse C:\From Seagate\C\Recycled in Explorer -- IT Utilities trash folder -- I see my own recycle bin. C:\From Seagate\C\Recycled is not even a valid path to a Win32 recycler folder, and there is no desktop.ini, but that doesn't deter Explorer from mistaking it for my real C:\RECYCLER folder.

I've tried to reproduce the fonts bug, by putting Fonts\desktop.ini into a fresh Z:\WINNT\Fonts, and making this new folder a system folder, but it won't take. I might have to restart Explorer to have it behave, since desktop.ini is a fickle beast. For now, it shows me a normal folder.

Daniel Beardsmore:

(I also dislike cmd auto-completing desktop.ini but copy then lying that it does not exist and refusing to copy it until I use attrib to -s -h it.)

A very succinct description of the standard command line tools. I always thought there was a way to copy with the system and hidden attributes set, but it turns out there isn't. This is why I like Cygwin...

/One of these days, I'm gonna just use every tag available... 

Fred Foobar:

Daniel Beardsmore:

(I also dislike cmd auto-completing desktop.ini but copy then lying that it does not exist and refusing to copy it until I use attrib to -s -h it.)

A very succinct description of the standard command line tools. I always thought there was a way to copy with the system and hidden attributes set, but it turns out there isn't. This is why I like Cygwin... 

Carnildo:

It used to be that you could access hidden files by naming them directly on the command line, but wildcards wouldn't match them.

It all depends on which set of API calls is used by the program you're invoking.

Just to be completely inconvenient, there's approximately five different sets of calls, and even the programs shipped with windows itself are arbitrary in which ones they use. There is no noticeable consistency and it's not documented anywhere - you just have to try each one in turn and find out.